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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
With 379 long, long days to go until the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook is promising to do a better job than it did in 2016 of preventing bad actors, both foreign and domestic, from abusing its platform to potentially affect the outcome.
The company unveiled a slew of "election integrity efforts" today, saying the measures will "help protect the democratic process" by identifying threats, closing vulnerabilities, and reducing "the spread of viral misinformation and fake accounts."
The sheer scope of the problem is admittedly mind-boggling but perhaps unsurprising, given that Facebook's most recent investor report claimed more than 2.4 billion monthly active users on the platform (Instagram also boasts more than 1 billion MAUs). Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters that the company spends "billions" on security annually, totaling more in a given year than Facebook's annual revenue at the time it went public. (For context, Facebook went public in 2012; it posted total revenues of just about $5 billion for that fiscal year. Its total revenue for 2018 was about $55.8 billion.)
All that money goes to a combination of projects that aim to reduce both fake news and voter-suppression efforts, Zuckerberg said. "I'm confident we are more prepared now" than in 2016, he added.
Facebook's biggest target is "coordinated inauthentic behavior"—big bunches of super-fake accounts posting super-fake stuff—that originates from a certain geographic area. Today, in tandem with its announcement about election security, the company updated its policy on how it will handle different kinds of coordinated efforts.
"We're constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don't want our services to be used to manipulate people," Facebook said. To that end, the company works with the intelligence community and law enforcement to identify and take down disinformation campaigns, particularly around elections.
[...] Facebook also said it will upgrade its ad library, a database that documents political advertising, to include an overall US presidential-candidate spending tracker. The database will also know what type of audience was shown ads, where that audience lives, and what platforms it was using.
That said, however, the social media giant has also confirmed several times that its community guidelines—which prohibit, among other things, certain kinds of hate speech—do not apply to politicians. Politicians' posts are also not subject to fact-checking. Political ads are also exempt from ad guidelines that apply to other kinds of advertisements. That means a candidate or sitting public servant can lie in a political ad and Facebook will still accept their money and run the promotion. (The politicians just can't include fake buttons or profanity.)
So what happens if ads from a verified campaign are considered to cross the line into voter suppression? We've got 379 days left to find out.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Funny) by barbara hudson on Tuesday October 22 2019, @06:08PM (5 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2019, @06:23PM
Re-elect Pumpkinhead 2020!
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2019, @06:24PM (2 children)
What you think doesn't matter. It's the avocado-toast-eating millennials that he's interested in, since they have the attention span of a flea and can't remember anything once it's scrolled off their screens.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday October 22 2019, @06:38PM (1 child)
...because scrolling down their Facebook feed triggers Pavlovian expectations of new instant gratification?
Were you chiming in to criticize social media for fabricating a new mental health problem, or were you just trying to tell the Facebook addicts to get off your lawn?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday October 22 2019, @08:50PM
I'm suddenly tempted to register grassboot.com and market it as the facebook for boomers.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 22 2019, @11:28PM
Given the vegetablive** status you describe, seems like a dangerous thing to beef up anything.
True, neither porking down is less dangerous, but at least is more tast... err, profitable.
** yes, that's an actual word. True, I invented it on the spot, but it is a word; look, it uses non-whitespace characters in a sequence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford